Cooking With Indigenous Ingredients: A Day With The Sioux Chef | On The Road

I remember last time I was here, we talked about the crickets and you were telling me how you prepared them. I was like, is that a standard for crickets? And you were like, there's no standard for crickets. Minnesota, the Dakota Sioux word for the river's sky-tinted water, is home to 11 federally recognized tribal nations, yet many Minnesotans have little knowledge of these communities' history or culture. We don't talk much about Native Americans in the history books. We talk about colonization, we talk about removal, the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson, and then it really doesn't get mentioned again, which leaves people to believe that we don't exist anymore as modern people. In the heart of Minneapolis, just off the shore of the Mississippi River, chef Sean Sherman is rewriting the culinary narrative one recipe at a time. I think what Sean's doing is absolutely amazing. Sean has taken all those traditional foods and created, you know, modern recipes that anyone can enjoy. His restaurant, Awami, serves modern indigenous food using only pre-colonial ingredients native to North America. When did the idea for Awami start to formulate? Around 2003, probably, somebody had approached me to work on a concept for one of the local museums here in the cities on Native American foods, and then realizing that I didn't know hardly anything about my Lakota food, and then as I started searching around, realizing that just it was invisible, like there was no Native American restaurants out there really, and it just set me on that path of trying to understand all those pieces. Joined by Cooks Country editor-in-chief Tony Tipton-Martin and food writer Mecca Boss, I sat down with Sean to experience all that Awami had to offer. We just tried to showcase what's possible with modern indigenous foods, so basically just identifying our indigenous pantries, and the philosophy was cutting out colonial ingredients and removing things that were introduced by Europeans. So no dairy, no wheat flour, no cane sugar, no beef, pork, chicken, focusing on a lot of wild game, so we have things like elk and venison and bison and rabbit, we have lots of birds like ducks and geese and quail and turkeys, of course, and also just making dishes taste like certain areas, you know, so trying to be really intentional about the location of the foods and where they come from and the flavors that are around them. It just looks so inviting, right? I mean, I think everybody's first impression is that something's going to be taken away from them. Those of us that have these cultural connections realize that there's just so much more than what we've been conditioned to think of in the standard American diet. One thing that comes to mind is sorbet versus ice cream, right? Like sorbet, like those flavors hit your tongue and it's like a Ferrari, you know, because you don't have all that dairy coating your mouth, you know, and when you eliminate all that butter and dairy and demi-glace and beef and all that stuff and all that fat, you really get like these alive flavors. That's an excellent way to put it. It's a Ferrari of flavors. It's just like zoom, you know? It's so good. A staple on the menu is grilled sweet potatoes with maple chili crisp. I'm just loving the play of the sweet and the spice. This char is also an important element. They get a little bit of that flavor on there, it's a little smokiness almost. Yeah, and it adds another level of texture. Absolutely. Can I do that at home? I'll figure something out for you. You're going to help me figure that out? It was a meal to remember and I was eager to learn more. The next day, I joined Sean before Awamni opened to see how some of my favorite dishes come together. At my house and my garden, usually at the end of the year, I'd harvest all of my chilies and just let them dry out. And then I would just make a huge batch of chili oil sweetened with maple. And I just brought that recipe forward with this. So you've been making this for many years now? For a while, you know? When I've had a good crop of chili peppers and just a bunch of randoms of everything. So it could be a little spicy, a little toasty, a little of all the things. Cool. All right, so the potatoes are roasted? Yeah, because all we're doing is we're just taking regular sweet potatoes. These are the white sweet potatoes. And we just get this from a local farm. So all we do is roast these until they're super tender. The roasted sweet potatoes are drizzled with sunflower oil and then placed on the grill to finish. When you started cooking and started to take an interest in indigenous products, pre-colonial products, where were you? You know, I always think there's this plateau that we all hit. Like we all overcomplicate ingredients and we mess with the food too much. And then at a certain point, you know, we were enlightened and we just let simplicity speak. You know, for me, like at that stage when I had the epiphany, like I had been a chef around Minneapolis for a few years. I had learned lots of different styles of things. And I had never really wanted a restaurant because I just thought restaurants were too financially scary. And like I didn't know where I would ever come up with that kind of money anyways to even think about it. But I also think that once I had this vision and started working on this, that I realized that restaurants are really important. And a good restaurant could really change the mentality of a huge group of people, like an entire city if not the world, you know, with some instances, you know. So I feel like the restaurant was the stage that we needed to really showcase what we're doing with this philosophy, with these foods and flavors and give us this playground to be creative and carve a path forward. Should we plate these up? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Sean slices the grilled sweet potatoes and adds the maple chili crisp, which he makes with chipotle, New Mexico, arbol, guajillo and ancho chilies. He garnishes with scallions, fresh herbs and edible flowers. That one's just so comforting. Like, you know, a lot of our staff just continues to eat that one constantly, you know, because it's just satisfying. Yeah, you know, like the smokiness on the sweet potato. I know there's a bunch of chilies in the oil. It looks intimidating. It looks like it's going to be spicy. But it's got also this gentle smokiness, this robustness to it that really just pairs well. You get the sweet, smoky, spicy element in one dish. It's really incredible. Next was a simple yet unique dish of native wild rice that included ingredients found right outside the door. Literally. All right, so this will be an easy one, too. So we're just going to make kind of a variation of rice falafel. We've got these ground cherries because they're in season right now. Beautiful lobsters that came in from a local forager. We've got our true hand-harvested rice. This is from a couple hours north of us near Colquet, Minnesota, in the Fond du Lac area. Then we have some hemlock needles that are dried. We have our fresh white cedar. And then we have some Labrador, which we call swamp tea also, but it grows all over the north. It's just going to be out in the forest right now. What kind of flavor does it add? It's really super mild, and it's almost like a green tea. But there's a lot of nutrients that come out of it. There's a lot of health benefits with this one in particular. When using ingredients like that, are they used as much for health as they are for flavor in some applications? Is it like a 50-50? It's more of the understanding that all the food is medicine, and it's understanding that all this food around us has properties to it to help us. And we should be a lot more proactive when it comes to thinking about how we eat. Because we know, as Americans, we just eat the weirdest food, and then we feel awful, and then we do it again. I don't know why I feel so bad. But if you want to help, you can help me pick a few of these. We don't need all of them, but just add a nice little pop. I won't throw these in until the very end. Can I try one? Yeah, help yourself. So sweet. It's almost like a sweet tomato. Yeah. The ingredients are added to the pot with a little sunflower oil. They cook for a moment to release their flavors before the rice is added. I'm going to throw in our rice. And basically, I'm just going to throw in an equal amount of water. It doesn't need much, and you can add a little bit more water if you need it. But yeah, like one to one and a half, depending on how tender it is. And this is pure maple syrup. This is harvested up here in Minnesota, too. Is that a standard whenever you make wild rice? I like it just adds a little bit of extra flavor to the whole situation. And up here, like maple sugar was one of the main seasonings for a lot of the tribes, especially in the woodlands. But it was just something really special that people just would season a lot of their food with up here. I'm going to throw in a little bit of the Labrador tea, just as an extra, just nutrients, and just a little bit of a soft flavor. So how long will this cook for? Probably just close to 20-ish minutes, 18 minutes, somewhere right in there. A short simmer later, and the rice was ready to plate. And like everything that's in here with those lobster mushrooms, Labrador, cedar, hemlock, maple, like all these things are literally just what lives outdoors right here. It's like this really represents just these great lakes right now. Everything smells familiar, but brand new at the same time. It's finished with the ground cherries, the fresh cedar we harvested outside the restaurant, and toasted crickets. A couple of crickets on top for fun. These crickets have been roasted? Yeah, we boiled them in maple water and then toasted them with a little bit of salt. That's pretty much it. Yeah, I think the sweetness from the maple syrup really kind of, it almost feels like it's been there the whole time within the rice, you know? The almost piney-ness of the cedar and hemlock really comes through. Like I said, it all smells very familiar. But to eat it, you know, it smells like a walk through the forest. But to eat it is a whole new taste experience. Yeah, I feel like it tastes like camping, kind of, in a weird way. Again, that simplicity part of it, that's just where the key is at. It's just letting things be, letting things be what they want to be in just a few ingredients. That's all you really need. Excellent. Excellent stuff here, man. John's mission stretches far beyond the doors of Wawami. He's also the founder of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIVS for short, an organization with a vision to rekindle and empower indigenous food sovereignty. My biggest vision is pushing this into our non-profit and making one big unit to make this a place where the cash flow helps us with a lot of our programming and a lot of our mission when it comes to our non-profit work. An important aspect of that non-profit work is the Indigenous Food Lab, a professional indigenous kitchen and training center where native chefs can take classes on cooking, Native American agriculture, and seed-saving techniques. Part of the lab is a small marketplace where a variety of goods from native vendors are sold. Here in the market, it was just a creative place where we can create access to indigenous food products from indigenous food producers and really highlight a lot of these amazing products all over the place. You know, a lot of people would stop way down here, but you're always thinking about the next step and how to improve and how to get bigger and better. It makes me feel lazy. I love that drive. You're thinking like 10 steps ahead. Yeah, because we're trying to, you know, tackle food distribution, food access. You know, food access is the biggest thing we're working on because it's like we've talked about. It's hard to have access to any kind of healthy foods, let alone your own cultural relevant foods. So we want to change that, and we're doing that through real projects just like this one. Food sovereignty is so important in tribal communities because it really can change the dynamic when it comes to those health disparities. So bringing, you know, traditional gardens back, having people reconnect with the earth as you're fostering those gardens, I think that is a huge part in addressing some of the health disparities in Indian country. Another tenant of Sean's mission is honoring the land. Sean invited me to an urban medicine garden his organization manages and uses to teach natives and the community at large about indigenous plants. How many different varieties of plants are in here, do you reckon? Oh, probably 120 or so. And you can identify all of them? Every one of them by scientific name, Lakota name, and English name. Wow. Ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk has been teaching about edible and medicinal plants for over 25 years. Almost like a citrusy burst in the beginning, like a little bit of lemon with some salinity to it. As she guided us through the space, we sampled several of the garden's many offerings. Where everyone would look down here, like Sean was saying, and see weeds, we see food and medicine. This is amaranth, which is an ancient grain that's been utilized for thousands of years by indigenous people. And then as we move further here, we have this mallow. This is literally in the mallow family. You could cook this down and make marshmallows with it. It's a really great salad green. You'll notice that little bit of mucilaginous quality. Yeah. It's like that okra kind of. Yeah, it's related to okra. That's nice. That's a really pleasant thing to eat. Yeah, I really like it a lot. You know, as we walk through here, I'm worried about like stepping on all these plants. I don't know what's a plant, what's a weed. You know what? This is probably the one garden where you don't have to worry about that. Indigenous plants can certainly handle us walking all over them. Just like indigenous people, indigenous plants are super resilient. I'm glad Shawn is bringing to the forefront the fact that we need to connect with nature because the things we need the most, the things that nourish us, are really just right outside. People want to know some of these things. Like people would like to have this education, but it hasn't been a part of our school system, you know. But we can put this education out there for people because people should educate themselves so they start eating everything because everything's edible once. But you want to have some knowledge around it before you actually just start eating things, you know. Shawn is so much more than a chef, and his work goes so much further than food. As a philanthropist, entrepreneur, teacher, and advocate, he's honoring the traditions of his heritage, making his mark on the present, and blazing a trail for future generations. You know, I'm not getting younger, and I have, you know, X amount of years in my life to really want to focus on doing something really important and impactful. And I can see it. I can see this path really clearly, and I'm just going to keep moving forward with it. Eventually, I want to take some time and enjoy life and, you know, have a place in Belize or something and grow fruit and coffee and fish, you know. But between now and then, I feel like there's so much work to do, and it's just setting the stage for the next generation. Native cuisine is a celebration of ancestral connections and a rich respect for ingredients sourced from our surroundings. Here, innovation and tradition intermingle on plates, and both old and new flavors taste like home. Man, I am so speechless after an amazing week here in Minneapolis. I want to thank Sean and Rebecca and Linda for their time and generosity. 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